Tag: work

To those who responded to my plea for help by leaving a comment or responding out-of-band, thank you very much. We’ve settled on a name for our application, purchased the corresponding domain names and filed a trade mark application. Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve Read more about Thanks for your help[…]

For anyone who’s using Subversion through Textmate, you might be interest in Ciarán Walsh’s SVNMate plugin. It changes the icons for files and folders in the project drawer depending upon their SVN status. Very handy.

Valued readers, would you be so kind as to lend 15 seconds of your time completing the following task for me, your humble host. I ask that, from among the five names below (which, for various reasons, all begin with the word “cite”), you choose the one name that you believe sounds the best. The Read more about I need your help[…]

In another piece of NICTA news, on Thursday Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced that the state government will invest $10.05 million in NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory over the next four years. Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Australian IT news article: Technologies developed by NICTA’s Queensland facility are widely used by the state government. One Read more about NICTA Queensland gets more funding[…]

It’s probably time to come clean about my recent spate of posts on startups, Ruby, Python and so on. Well, there are a few things about peer review and publishing in the realm of academia that I think could be better, so I tried to figure out an alternative process that retains the benefits and Read more about Startup: an explanation[…]

I’ve got some time to work on the context manager today, and I’m listening to some stuff as I code. Here’s a sample: Also check out The Get Out Clause and this video. It was made by requesting CCTV footage through the Freedom of Information act (apparently). Update: Here’s the “Paper” video clip inline:

When you’ve spent years coding pretty much everything in Java, it’s hard to break out of the Java way of doing things. It means that you tend to forget that other languages might have things called closures, for example. Here’s how a closure looks in Python: lambda x:dosomethingto(x,anothervariable) The neat thing is that this closure Read more about Rediscovering closures and nested functions[…]

Big companies will slowly suck the life out of you. That’s one way of summarising Paul Graham‘s latest essay. To maximise your freedom, he says, join a start-up or start one yourself. It’s a theory that I find very appealing.